The Mark of the Assassin Read Free Page B

bay, the brown hills of
    Marin in the distance. The last light of the afternoon retreated, and
    after a few minutes his own reflection stared back at him in the glass.
    Beckwith disliked the word "patrician," but even he had to admit it was
    an accurate description of his appearance and bearing. His advisers
    joked that if God had created the perfect political candidate, it would
    have been James Beckwith. He stood out in any room he entered. He was
    well over six feet tall, with a full head of shimmering hair that had
    turned gray-white by the time he was forty. There was a strength about
    him, a lingering physical agility from his days as a star football and
    baseball player at Stanford. The eyes were pale blue and turned down at
    the corners, the features of his face narrow and restrained, the smile
    careful but confident. His skin was permanently tanned from countless
    hours aboard Democracy. When Beckwith assumed the presidency four years
    earlier, he had made one promise to himself: He would not allow the
    office to consume him the way it had consumed so many of his
    predecessors. He ran thirty minutes each day on the treadmill and spent
    another thirty minutes lifting weights in the White House gym. Other men
    had grown haggard in the office. James Beckwith had lowered his weight
    and added an inch of muscle to his chest. Beckwith had not sought out
    politics; politics had come to him. He was the top prosecutor in the San
    Francisco District Attorney's office when he caught the eye of the
    state's Republican elite. With Anne and their three children at his
    side, Beckwith easily won every race he entered. His rise had seemed
    effortless, as if he were preordained to greatness. California elected
    him attorney general, then lieutenant governor. It sent him to the U.S.
    Senate for two terms and then brought him back to Sacramento for a term
    as governor, the final preparation for his ascent to the White House.
    Throughout his political career, the professionals surrounding him had
    crafted a careful image. James Beckwith was a common-sense conservative.
    James Beckwith was a man the country could trust. James Beckwith could
    get things done. He was exactly the kind of man the Republican Party was
    looking for, a moderate with a pleasing face, a presentable
    counterbalance to the hard-line conservatives in Congress. After eight
    years of Democratic control of the White House, the country had been in
    the mood for change. The country chose Beckwith. Now, four years later,
    the country wasn't sure it still wanted him. He turned from the window,
    walked to his desk, and poured himself a cup of coffee from a
    chrome-colored insulated carafe. Beckwith believed that from all
    adversity good things come. The downing of an American jetliner off Long
    Island was an egregious act of international terrorism, a savage and
    cowardly deed that could not go unanswered. The electorate soon would be
    told what Beckwith already knew: Transatlantic Flight 002 had been
    brought down by a Stinger missile, apparently launched from a small
    craft offshore. The American people would be frightened, and if history
    were a guide, they would turn to him for comfort and assurance. James
    Beckwith detested the business of politics, but he was savvy enough to
    realize that the terrorists had handed him a golden opportunity. For the
    past year his approval ratings had hovered below fifty percent, death
    for an incumbent president. His acceptance speech at the Republican
    National Convention had been flat and lifeless. The Washington press
    corps had branded his vision for a second term "warmed over first-term."
    Some of its elite members had begun writing his political obituary. With
    just one month before the election, he trailed his opponent, Democratic
    Senator Andrew Sterling of Nebraska, by three to five points in most
    national polls.
    The electoral map looked different, though. Beckwith had conceded New
    York, New England, and the industrial